Um... Since the introduction of smartphones and the networks which support them? Broadband simply refers to a "high speed" (which I suppose is relative) "always on" connection. Your smartphone fits that bill. And for it to work, you pay for a subscription to a "mobile broadband provider". I'm not sure why there's confusion at all. That is precisely the correct terminology.

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2) When people are complaining about lack of choice in the marketplace they're usually upset someone like Comcast is the only person who can bring premium high-speed service to their address, with other options such as phone line, satellite, or mobile service only offering lower speeds on data transfers, and forming more of low-quality service option, instead of direct competition.

Sure. Again though, as I've pointed out in numerous NN threads, nothing that's being proposed changes this. The reality is that you have only two types of wiring that goes into your home that is capable of high speed (highest speed?) internet. Your phone line and your cable feed. There will always be one company and only one company licensed by your local town/city/whatever to run and operate each of those lines and thus provide you with internet service (that's the IS in ISP). This means that you're going to only have two high speed options at best. Everything else, somewhat by physical limitations, will fall into the "low quality service option" you mention.

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3) That somehow having the 4 top carriers in the USA (Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T) take up ~75% of the market share is better, as if an oligopoly is going to offer them drastically better service, or not want to harvest their personal data for business use. Your phone isn't exactly a bastion of privacy either for that matter.

Eh. Again, that's somewhat irrelevant. How many providers nationwide is somewhat meaningless. In terms of home network, you're bound by the physical location and the owner/operator of the physical wires coming into your home. Obviously, we do want to make sure there are multiple different companies offering these services across the nation, but it's not like very many people are going to decide to move where they live just to buy a different company's internet service. Having the ability to look over the fence and see the other side is useful from a "I'm going to demand better service" kind of way, but the cable company in area A is not in any way in direct competition with the cable company in area B. They are only in competition with the phone company in area A. And again, that's a physical limitation that we kinda can't get around.

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I doubt search engines, websites, and other misc. internet-based businesses, the government, etc are going to stop tracking browsing history, web traffic information, and gathering misc. personal data just because we eased regulations a bit.

Except we didn't ease regulations on them at all. We undid a regulatory change that didn't affect those internet content providers at all. That's the whole point. The folks you're handing data to when you use a search engine, remote website, or web based business are all not ISPs. The regulation that changed only shifted ISPs (and only ISPs) from being regulated by the FTC to being regulated by the FCC. It did not in any way affect google, or amazon, or facebook, etc. So undoing does not affect those things either.

It, at the very worse, means that your privacy protections are the same as they were a year ago, before the previous changes. And given that the changes did more or less zero to protect your privacy, the new change has more or less zero effect on your privacy. That was the point of the editorial. The biggest vector for your data being collected and used in ways you may not want is via social media and web searches. But the target of the previous changes was specifically the parts of the internet that don't do those things.

It was entirely about using the boogieman of "protecting privacy" as an excuse to do something they've been trying to do for like a decade and a half. Impose government restrictions on bandwidth utilization at the provider level by declaring them to be telecommunications services and thus subject to rules written up to a century ago for phone lines. We can debate who "they" are, and why "they" want to do this (and I have in the past), but the change last year had nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with the same old network neutrality BS. They just changed the name and did it via executive action rather than legislation. Same old same old.

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gbaji wrote:

So I'm not sure why there's massive crying about privacy here, but total silence when the actual harmful regulation was put in place last year.

I've been told I whine too much already. Have to choose my battles, or at least wait for others to go first so I can claim I was caught up in the crowd mentality.

Fair enough. My explanation is that when things go in the direction the Left wants, very few people in the media make a deal out of it, and they certainly don't write alarming editorials and do news reports on them. But when something goes in the direction the Right wants (or in a direction the Left doesn't want), the media yells and screams, editorials are written, and you hear about them on the evening news (or at least they get tossed into your face online). Which explains why we're hearing about the horrible actions of the GOP repealing the change made last year (and yes, expressed in exactly that way), but heard nearly nothing when the change actually occurred.

I'm not sure why there's confusion at all. That is precisely the correct terminology.

Probably because of the "(which I suppose is relative)" part. I wouldn't consider my phone at all high-speed. The upload/down speeds are a small fraction of what someone could get through the cable jack.

gbaji wrote:

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3) That somehow having the 4 top carriers in the USA (Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T) take up ~75% of the market share is better, as if an oligopoly is going to offer them drastically better service, or not want to harvest their personal data for business use. Your phone isn't exactly a bastion of privacy either for that matter.

Eh. Again, that's somewhat irrelevant.

Well it is if someone is using them as an example of a competitive market. But yes, it has very little to do with NN or privacy.

gbaji wrote:

They are only in competition with the phone company in area A. And again, that's a physical limitation that we kinda can't get around.

Hence the "internet as a public utility" movement, I suppose.

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It, at the very worse, means that your privacy protections are the same as they were a year ago, before the previous changes. And given that the changes did more or less zero to protect your privacy, the new change has more or less zero effect on your privacy.

This is sounding better and better.

gbaji wrote:

It's not like this is a hard pattern to spot.

Depends on which media you consume?

TBH, most of my objections to the article were in isolation, and more-or-less tangential to the already on-going debate in the thread. Mostly it being a poorly written and using examples that seemed silly. I'm not too hung up on the whole NN thing as I see it more of small potatoes compared to other things. It's a small part of larger privacy issues, noncompetitive markets aren't being addressed either way, and it's not like it getting easier to access contradictory or alternative viewpoints on issues.

I'm not sure why there's confusion at all. That is precisely the correct terminology.

Probably because of the "(which I suppose is relative)" part. I wouldn't consider my phone at all high-speed. The upload/down speeds are a small fraction of what someone could get through the cable jack.

But from the point of view of the regulations in question, they perform the function of an ISP. The term broadband isn't really about the relative speed of the connection, but that it's an "always on/available" network. It's in specific contrast to say firing up a modem and calling a phone number to connect to, and then just directly accessing whatever computer was on the other end (or, via stuff that's now ancient like PPP/SLIP, using that systems connection to other systems to access the newfangled thing called the internet, and directing the result back along your phone line to your computer at home).

Mobile Broadband simply means that the protocols sit on top of existing cell phone infrastructure. Yeah, I get that it's a bit confusing because one could argue that they're more like the old modem dial up systems of ages past, but they functionally act like a broadband connection to the user, so they're treated that way. When you activate your phone, you select a broadband provider (verizon, sprint, tmobile, etc). They become your provider for that phone as long as you have a contract with them. You can change that contract, which often requires changing the phone, since they usually have specific eeprom-like code on the phones themselves that can't be (easily/legally) changed, but you can't just decide "I'm going to connect to Sprint's network today and access the internet through them", if you have a Verizon phone.

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Well it is if someone is using them as an example of a competitive market. But yes, it has very little to do with NN or privacy.

The editorial was not though. They were making a point about relative volume of use, specifically as regards where the greatest risk to internet user's private data lies. The whole point was "if this change were really about protecting privacy, why does it target the set of ISPs, each of which only interact with a relatively small portion of total internet traffic, instead of much larger targets like google and facebook, which each individually interact with a much larger percentage, and are specifically designed to collect, store, and use metadata by users based on how they use the products themselves. Google pays attention to the searches you do, and shapes future searches to those patterns. Facebook collects a boatload of information about how you use the product and shapes ads, feeds, etc, based on that. ISPs don't do this. They don't care where you go when you pass through their system. They earn their income from providing you the onramp to the internet. And just as the onramp doesn't care about your eventual destination, nor what you do when you get there, neither does your ISP. There's no money to be made on creating infrastructure to track your activities. There's a ton of money for those other destinations to do so, because that's how they make money.

Full disclosure, of course, an ISP that also provides some content may have an interest in that. So Comcast may wish you to use their content instead of a competitors. So yeah, there's always a need to keep an eye on them to make sure they aren't taking advantage of their position as ISP to give them an advantage as an ICP. But there are already existing laws governing this, and when ISPs have attempted to do this, they've generally been slapped with lawsuits and fines pretty heavily. Um... And ironically, those are best governed by the FTC and *not* the FCC (which was one of the points of the editorial). The FTC is specifically about handling unfair trade/business practices. The FCC is not.

So if you've had a beef with Comcast throttling access rates to competing content providers, the shift from FTC to FCC is a bad thing, and you should be happy that this changes it back.

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gbaji wrote:

They are only in competition with the phone company in area A. And again, that's a physical limitation that we kinda can't get around.

Hence the "internet as a public utility" movement, I suppose.

Sure. But that's a massive square peg into round hole problem. The problem is that there are a number of requirements placed on public utilities that make sense when the public utility is gas, electricity, phone lines, and cable lines. When the "utility" is an internet connection (sometimes, but not always running on the latter two), those requirements stop making any sense at all. The service provided by an ISP is very very different from those provided by other utilities and should not be treated the same.

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It, at the very worse, means that your privacy protections are the same as they were a year ago, before the previous changes. And given that the changes did more or less zero to protect your privacy, the new change has more or less zero effect on your privacy.

This is sounding better and better.

I only mention it to point out that those proclaiming this recent change to be some kind of massive negative hit to their privacy are completely wrong. They'd only have a minor point *if* the change that we're unchanging actually benefited their privacy, such that it's undoing would undo that. But there was no benefit to privacy from the previous change. The biggest effect would have been to likely remove some existing protections that you had. Unfortunately, as I've noted in years of discussing this topic, there's a whole heck of a lot of just plain false information out there about this. And a lot of emotion generated based on that false information.

At the end of the day, this entire thing is purely about taking something that has worked wonderfully for a few decades now, under minimal government regulations and controls, and placing it under massive government regulation and control. It has nothing to do with increasing privacy. It has nothing to do with making your internet "better". It has everything to do with government busybodies who innately believe that the government is always the best arbiter of everything in the world, looking around them, seeing something they don't control but which is monumentally successful, and doing everything they can to change that. It doesn't matter to them if that makes things better or worse. I suspect they just don't like to see any examples around them of things that work in the absence of significant government regulation. It might just make people think that they aren't actually needed so much.

And we can't have that, now can we?

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TBH, most of my objections to the article were in isolation, and more-or-less tangential to the already on-going debate in the thread. Mostly it being a poorly written and using examples that seemed silly. I'm not too hung up on the whole NN thing as I see it more of small potatoes compared to other things. It's a small part of larger privacy issues, noncompetitive markets aren't being addressed either way, and it's not like it getting easier to access contradictory or alternative viewpoints on issues.

Honestly, my primary issue with NN is that every piece of legislation or regulation I've seen written in its pursuit seems to have incredibly worrisome bits added into it that can easily be used to engage in controls that would be harmful to the functioning of the internet as we know it. Most significantly from funding. Every NN proposal I've seen seems almost designed to create restrictions that would make it so that most existing private funding would cease (due to essentially making it non-profitable). Which, one can only assume, would have to be replaced with government funding. Which, one can speculate, will come with increased government control, government surveillance, mandates, costs (hidden via taxes), etc.

It's really about socializing the internet. And yeah, I'm opposed to that more or less on principle. Regulations that prohibit packet prioritization (often hidden in language like "unbiased network access", or "fair use networks", or well, "network neutrality"), can be applied such that companies which currently pay large amounts of money to have very high data rate connections could no longer do that. They'd have to use the same network speeds as the average of everyone else. Seems "fair", right? Everyone gets the same speed. The network is "neutral" in terms of data traveling across it. And fairness reigns supreme! Except that those companies are currently paying for like 90% of the entire infrastructure cost of the internet which everyone else gets to use (at a somewhat slower speed) for "free". Eliminate that, and you eliminate the funding. And yeah, I can see exactly where that will ultimately have to end.

It's really about socializing the internet. And yeah, I'm opposed to that more or less on principle.

How is the internet, in this day and age, different from roads, electricity, sewage, and clean water access?

ALSO: A phone line, or for that matter a DSL line, is not even remotely "broadband".

ALSO: ALSO: If you don't have a degree you are NOT an "engineer". Nice try, though.

____________________________

Jophiel wrote:

Last week, I saw a guy with an eyepatch and a gold monocle and pointed him out to Flea as one of the most awesome things I've seen, ever. If I had an eyepatch and a gold monocle, I'd always dress up as Mr. Peanut but with a hook hand and a parrot.

The consumer pays for internet service, that's the entire premise for ISPs and is what allows for the content variety of the internet. If the business model you had during the inception of the internet was to have content producers be the ones who essentially designed and paid for lines to be build out toward your end user (or subcontracted, etc.), you wouldn't have the internet, period. It was an idiotic model then, and is an idiotic model now.

It's really about socializing the internet. And yeah, I'm opposed to that more or less on principle.

How is the internet, in this day and age, different from roads, electricity, sewage, and clean water access?

Because the internet uses the infrastructure. In the same way that businesses and restaurants and homes *use* those other services you listed. I get that this may be a bit complicated, but there's a distinction to be made between the physical wires themselves and the data that flows over them. In the case of "traditional" ISPs, the physical wires are covered as a public utility, since they are licensed by the city they're operating in. In exactly the same way that the water, gas, sewage, etc, is. So if we're talking about your telephone and cable service, that's one thing. The use of those tools to connect to the internet is a whole different thing. It's the difference between having a road connecting your house to other places, and paying for a taxi to drive you on that road (or owning a car and driving yourself).

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ALSO: A phone line, or for that matter a DSL line, is not even remotely "broadband".

The 90s called. They'd like their phone lines back. You've heard of fiber based phone lines, right? Today, you're likely to get the fastest connection over a phone line and not via a cable connection as in past decades. Scary, I know.

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ALSO: ALSO: If you don't have a degree you are NOT an "engineer". Nice try, though.

I'll keep that in mind if I'm ever called upon to design a bridge or something. Does that apply to driving a train too? How do you get those cool hats?

The pattern is what the mostly liberal posters on this board think are important enough to create threads about.

So not "the media" like you originally said. 's like you're so used to lying you don't even notice when you're doing it.

No. "The media", as in "all those sources that liberal posters read or watch and then come to this forum and write posts about". I would hope that you can see that what "the media" chooses to make into a big deal influences what "the posters on this forum" come to think are big deals. And it's not a difficult pattern to spot. Democrat does something questionable, media downplays it, no one on this forum mentions it (or perhaps even notices it). Republican does something questionable, media goes crazy with the story, and this forum is suddenly aflutter with posters who are quite sure that whatever it is must be the most important thing in the universe and they care a whole lot about it, because it's just that darn important!

I don't have to watch a single minute of news myself to see the pattern happen.

I don't have to watch a single minute of news myself to see the pattern happen.

It's called verification. It's actually quite important when trying to discern patterns. Otherwise it's just assumptions and speculation.

If only there was this thing, perhaps some kind of "interconnected network", where we could go looking for information that might verify something, rather than waiting for information to be selectively beamed to those magical boxes called "televisions" in our homes.

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While you admitting it is nice, it wasn't anything the rest of us didn't know.

Admitting what? That I haven't seen any news stories about this on TV since this thread was started? I'm not sure what the problem is here. So instead of watching some news segment about the subject, or reading some news article about the subject, and accepting that other person's viewpoint and opinion, I instead read what was posted on this forum, and then did the totally crazy thing of actually reading the bill undoing the regulatory changes and then did the even crazier thing of reading the original regulatory change itself, and then... and this will absolutely blow your mind: forming my own opinion about it.

I'll freely admit to reading the source data itself rather than a news article about that material. Is that a problem?

If only there was this thing, perhaps some kind of "interconnected network", where we could go looking for information that might verify something, rather than waiting for information to be selectively beamed to those magical boxes called "televisions" in our homes.

You literally just claimed that the pattern was discerned from the posters ON THIS FORUM, not from other sources.

And, almost not needed to say, but: A lot (A LOT!!!) of the anti-left sentiment posted to the web these days is paid schills from Putin's Russia. But I'm sure you'll discount that as you are wise enough to filter the chaff from the wheat, right?

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Jophiel wrote:

Last week, I saw a guy with an eyepatch and a gold monocle and pointed him out to Flea as one of the most awesome things I've seen, ever. If I had an eyepatch and a gold monocle, I'd always dress up as Mr. Peanut but with a hook hand and a parrot.

And, almost not needed to say, but: A lot (A LOT!!!) of the anti-left sentiment posted to the web these days is paid schills from Putin's Russia. But I'm sure you'll discount that as you are wise enough to filter the chaff from the wheat, right?

I want to skip the obvious and move right to the point about old people. He does not strike me as a complete idiot ( a shill maybe, but he is a politician so it is a given ) so I am wondering if he truly believes that. Personally, I find it harder and harder not to use net. Half of the school **** is online, banks would love to drop tellers altogether, and most of my non-stuff_that_needs_be_done time is usually spent online in way or another.

My take is he is an old out of touch man from the pre-internet era. This isn't to say he's a total write-off, he does appear to believe in allowing normal citizens access, through his town halls etc. and it would be a shame if the reason he was voted out was due to the ramifications of that, as opposed to strictly his decision on the matter, as I believe that is disincentivizing good behavior.

If only there was this thing, perhaps some kind of "interconnected network", where we could go looking for information that might verify something, rather than waiting for information to be selectively beamed to those magical boxes called "televisions" in our homes.

The last few times we've told you that in your future that particular magical device does get created you insisted you were too busy to use it because you had "a real job."

gbaji wrote:

That I haven't seen any news stories about this on TV since this thread was started?

And exactly how could you have possibly seen any news stories about it when you go out of your way to brag about how you don't watch news?

gbaji wrote:

and this will absolutely blow your mind: forming my own opinion about it.

It might if you could ever keep your story straight about how you come to "your" opinions, maybe.

gbaji wrote:

Is that a problem?

Only that even Uwe Boll wouldn't direct a movie with as flimsy a story as you've written.

____________________________

George Carlin wrote:

I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.

If only there was this thing, perhaps some kind of "interconnected network", where we could go looking for information that might verify something, rather than waiting for information to be selectively beamed to those magical boxes called "televisions" in our homes.

You literally just claimed that the pattern was discerned from the posters ON THIS FORUM, not from other sources.

No. I said that there are methods of learning things other than watching, listening, or reading news articles. You might want to try them sometime.

The bit about posters on this forum was related to the whole "there's an obvious pattern" bit. The posters on this forum are (well, were) a pretty decent barometer about what "the media" is screaming about at any given time, since about 80% of the threads on this forum are started by one poster or another coming here to repeat something they read or heard from some media source. My point was that I don't have to go read Huff Po to find out what people are saying there. I'll read about it here. I don't have to watch Rachel Maddow's show to hear about what her latest snarky opinion is. Someone will repeat it here. I don't have to speculate about what Anderson Cooper's opinion on some recent event is, because... you guessed it, someone will parrot it for me here.

To be fair, this has become less reliable of late, due to the drop off of posters here. But that only means that every single major liberal media whine isn't repeated here anymore. It does not invalidate the basic concept that if someone posts some liberal opinion on this forum, it's a pretty much guaranteed bet that this was the exact opinion expressed widely on most liberal media outlets the day before (or night before, or just hour before). It's not like most of the posters who come here to start a political discussion are going out and reading up on some subject all on their own and then out of the blue deciding to talk about it, right? They heard about it and posted about it. And 99% of the time they heard about it because it's the latest political topic of the moment.

Again. It's not a hard pattern to spot. And it's totally media driven. The reason we didn't have a discussion about the change to ISP regulation last year was exactly because it wasn't reported on the media most posters here consume and presented as some kind of negative thing they should be alarmed about. The reason we are having a discussion about the repeal of that change is because that *was* reported in such a manner.

What's really amusing is to speculate about whether the posters opinions are based at all on any kind of understanding of the underlying issue, or just based on how the media reported it. So if the same media outlets telling you that change B is bad because it undid change A, which was good, were instead telling you the opposite, that the NN changes were a really bad idea, and thank goodness that they've been repealed, would you be posting here insisting they were wrong? Or would you just dutifully accept the opinion you've been given and passionately argue that change A was good, and change B is bad? I suspect for most people, they just form their opinion based on what they are told. They "pick a side" and accept as truth whatever the media they associate as "on their side" says is true.

Just a speculation, of course. I'm sure you carefully examine the facts, do everything you can to educate yourself on the subject, and then come to an independent decision.

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And, almost not needed to say, but: A lot (A LOT!!!) of the anti-left sentiment posted to the web these days is paid schills from Putin's Russia. But I'm sure you'll discount that as you are wise enough to filter the chaff from the wheat, right?

I'm not sure how much is "a lot", but you're laboring under the false impression that my position on this topic is "new", much less the result of any sort of media telling me what my position should be. I'm sure there are a lot of anti-left sentiment out there. But I don't form my positions because some right leaning website or commentator said it was true. I really honestly don't.

And in this specific topic, I explained to you exactly my process. I have not read a single thing about this except what was written or linked to on this thread. I'm not aware of anyone making a huge deal about this on the right. At all. So I'm not sure how anti-left sentiment fits into this. I mean, maybe there's some web sight out there making a huge deal about this, complete with appeals to emotion and tons of harsh language or something, and I suppose it's even possible that this web site, which I've never heard of or read could possibly have some evil mustache twirling Russian operative funding it or something. But, at the risk of repeating myself, I didn't read it. I didn't talk to anyone who did. I haven't read anything written by anyone who did. And I certainly didn't form my opinion on this subject as a result of any possible influence from such a thing.

I'm not even sure where you were trying to go with that. Projection maybe?

The reason we didn't have a discussion about the change to ISP regulation last year was exactly because it wasn't reported on the media most posters here consume and presented as some kind of negative thing they should be alarmed about.

So if you don't mention something that doesn't mean anything, but when someone else doesn't it means they're manipulated by the media.

gbaji wrote:

What's really amusing is to speculate about whether the posters opinions are based at all on any kind of understanding of the underlying issue, or just based on how the media reported it.

Do you believe anyone is going to be distracted from your being proven to just mimicking whatever you overhear that fits your adopted narrative without any source whatsoever by your accusing other people of doing it? Historically it hasn't worked but maybe this time?

gbaji wrote:

But I don't form my positions because some right leaning website or commentator said it was true.

Sometimes you just take the contrarian position without any prompting or information at all.

____________________________

George Carlin wrote:

I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.

The reason we didn't have a discussion about the change to ISP regulation last year was exactly because it wasn't reported on the media most posters here consume and presented as some kind of negative thing they should be alarmed about.

So if you don't mention something that doesn't mean anything, but when someone else doesn't it means they're manipulated by the media.

If I don't mention something, it's because I have never made a habit of reading or watching something in the news and then coming here and starting a thread about it. I think I've literally done that maybe once or twice in the nearly 2 decades I've been posting here.

Other posters on this forum, quite obviously, do start threads here talking about things they read or heard or saw in the media. As I mentioned, a large percentage of the threads on this forum are started in that exact manner. I'm not saying that's wrong. It's just not something I typically do, and it is something that other people do.

But yeah, you can see the bias in the posters by looking at the stories they choose to start threads about and the ones that they don't. And no, I'm not condemning that at all. It's not like I haven't known for over a decade that this forum's member lean heavily left. So yeah, it's pretty reasonable that the threads that will be started will overwhelmingly be about issues of interest to those on the left. I'm just pointing out that fact. I guess what surprises me is how many people don't seem to be aware of this. Like I said. It's not a hard pattern to spot. Just look at the opening post of the threads on this page.

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gbaji wrote:

What's really amusing is to speculate about whether the posters opinions are based at all on any kind of understanding of the underlying issue, or just based on how the media reported it.

Do you believe anyone is going to be distracted from your being proven to just mimicking whatever you overhear that fits your adopted narrative without any source whatsoever by your accusing other people of doing it?

Again though, that's an interesting bit of projection, given that it's pretty easy to see that I very very very rarely ever start threads on this forum. I'm not the one picking the topics we discuss. I respond to them. And I think I've even explained why. I like to see what other people are thinking about something, and then respond with my own opinion. Dunno. I find that more entertaining than constantly running here to post about whatever the latest thing I heard about or read about said.

But yeah, it does make it hard to honestly level the charge you're making at me. I'm not picking the topics. Seems strange to level the label of "mimicking whatever you overhear" at the person responding to an opinion expressed in a thread and not at all at the guy who started the thread by posting a link to a news article in the first place. Even if we don't think the thread starter is merely parroting the opinion expressed (or parroting opposition to it), it's a good bet that the decision to post on that topic at all was influenced by the recent article or whatever on that subject. Right? I mean, I suppose it could be just a coincidence that a news article or editorial was written about a subject and the poster decided to create a thread about it and link to that source. He could have wanted to write about that all along, and randomly decided that "this is the day I start a thread about privacy" and then went out and found some online information about it, which just happened to have been written the day before and talked about extensively on various media outlets.

I'm sure that's the case... No. No, I'm not. I'm quite certain that in 99% of the cases, the person first encountered the news story, editorial, etc. Probably saw something about it on TV, or on social media, then read the source, then decided it was interesting and so posted it here. Again, I'm not saying that this is wrong. It certainly does generate topics to discuss. But it's kinda important to realize that this is the process involved and that maybe it's somewhat silly to point the finger of "parroting the media" at anyone who responds with a different opinion.

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gbaji wrote:

But I don't form my positions because some right leaning website or commentator said it was true.

Sometimes you just take the contrarian position without any prompting or information at all.

I read posts on this forum. I form an opinion about the post and the subject. I then post a response. In many cases, I don't read anything other than the post itself (and whatever responses have occurred). I guess I find it funny that you seem to assume that I read the post, then scamper off to some conservative source to find out what my position and counter argument should be, and then parrot that here. Um... Maybe that's how you do things, but it's not how I do it.

In this case, I literally have read nothing on this topic since it was posted except what has been posted here and linked here *and* I took the liberty of looking up the original regulatory changes that were made last year. And no, I didn't read any articles about those changes. I only read the text of the changes themselves. Because that way I'm basing my opinion purely on the changes themselves, and not based on someone else's opinion about those changes.

So yeah, I do find the allegations that I just parrot what I hear really funny. Obviously, I can't prove to you otherwise, but I know the truth. And I know the absolute absurdity of the claims. And I also suspect there's a fair amount of projection involved in those claims (although, obviously, I can't prove that either). But hey. I don't need to prove anything to you. You're free to believe what you want. I just find it funny how strongly you seem to need to cling to this belief. Dunno. I just find "you're just repeating what someone else said" to be a pretty weak argument by itself.

What's really amusing is to speculate about whether the posters opinions are based at all on any kind of understanding of the underlying issue, or just based on how the media reported it.

Do you believe anyone is going to be distracted from your being proven to just mimicking whatever you overhear that fits your adopted narrative without any source whatsoever by your accusing other people of doing it?

Again though, that's an interesting bit of projection, given that it's pretty easy to see that I very very very rarely ever start threads on this forum.

Yeah. Um...his statement has nothing to do whatsoever about you starting threads.

Are the hornets that nest in your skull screaming again? Are they the ones convincing you that we're so stupid we don't notice when you play these word games?

Honestly curious.

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Jophiel wrote:

Last week, I saw a guy with an eyepatch and a gold monocle and pointed him out to Flea as one of the most awesome things I've seen, ever. If I had an eyepatch and a gold monocle, I'd always dress up as Mr. Peanut but with a hook hand and a parrot.

So yeah, I do find the allegations that I just parrot what I hear really funny.

Given that 99.9999999% of the time what you say is an almost exact rendering of what the right wing media put out...

Just coincidence, eh?

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Jophiel wrote:

Last week, I saw a guy with an eyepatch and a gold monocle and pointed him out to Flea as one of the most awesome things I've seen, ever. If I had an eyepatch and a gold monocle, I'd always dress up as Mr. Peanut but with a hook hand and a parrot.